THE MAP OF THE MIDDLE EAST’S FUTURE

Remember when the map of Asia looked like this? It took a real feat of imagination 20 or 30 years ago to conceive how it might look differently, without the gigantic blob of the Soviet Union. For most folks back then, it was literally inconceivable. Yet as we all know, the map doesn’t look like this any more.

How about this map?

A lot of those yellow line borders you see are just as ephemeral as the Former Soviet Union’s. There used to be a line dividing North and South Yemen until 1990. Now it’s one country. There wasn’t a line between Ethiopia and Eritrea until 1993, when the latter ceased being a colony of the former. Instead of where it says “Somalia” it should say “Somaliland” which has seceded from Somalia to the south – so there’s a yellow line missing dividing the two.

There’s been a lot of talk recently predicting the break-up of Iraq back into its constituent pieces. The country was glued together by the British after World War I from three vilyets or provinces of the dismantled Ottoman Empire: Kurdish Mosul, Shia Basra, and Sunni Baghdad. Now it’s seems on the verge of becoming unglued.

Last week in The Persian Ratchet , we discussed how the break-up of Iraq would shatter Iran. Let’s talk now how an Iraq break-up would rearrange many of the other yellow lines you see above. Like how it would precipitate the break-up of Saudi Arabia.

You learned how fragile the Saudi Empire is in The Soviet Saudi Union . That the ruling Saudi-Wahhabi elite are Sunni Moslem, and call the Shia Moslems who live among them rafida, a contemptuous obscenity that is equivalent in Arabic to “nigger.”

The Shias may be a despised minority, but they are very concentrated in eastern Saudi, along the Persian Gulf from Qatar to Kuwait, then up to the border with Iraq. That’s where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is, like the giant Ghawar and Dhahran fields.

If the Shia region of southern Iraq goes independent, Iraqi and Saudi Shias will work together to split off eastern Saudi and merge it into an enlarged Shia Arab nation, with massive oil reserves. The Shia Arabs will be rafida no more.

This in turn will encourage Yemen to recapture the Saudi provinces of Asir and Najran, which the Saudis stole from it by military force in 1926.

The temptation to recapture the Hejaz – the west coast of Arabia with the “holy” cities of Mecca and Medina – will prove irresistible to the Hashem family (the rulers of Jordan) from whom the Saudis stole it by force in 1925.

As we saw in The Persian Ratchet, an independent Iraqi Kurdistan will expand to include Iranian Kurdistan across its eastern border, the massive chunk of southwest Turkey that is Turkish Kurdistan, and possibly Syrian Kurdistan east of the Euphrates. Wars with Turkey and Syria will ensue – although most likely not with Iran due to uprisings by millions of secessionist Azeris.

All of this is fairly predictable. The interesting question is what about the Sunni Arab Iraqis? Everyone assumes they would be left with a landlocked rump state stuck in the “Sunni Triangle” of central Iraq sucking hind mammary.

Don’t bet on it.

Iraq has the world’s second largest oil reserves at 115 billions barrels (next to Saudi at 267). This was determined under Saddam with obsolete 2D seismic technology. Most oil geologists think that 3D seismic scans will reveal much larger reserves, particularly out in the little-explored western deserts. Iraq may turn out to have more oil than Saudi Arabia.

The Kirkuk oil field is in the north, so the Kurds have that. The Rumaila, West Qurna, and Majnoon fields are in the south, so the Shias have that. What the Sunnis haven’t figured out yet is that there may be more oil in the west than both fields combined. Western Iraq, you see, is Sunni.

It’s not just this one switch that needs to be turned on inside Sunni heads. Another is that they are never going to run Iraq as a whole ever again. For centuries, they as the ruling elite treated the Kurds as vermin and the Shia as rafida. It has to dawn on them: As only 15% of Iraqi voters are Sunni Arabs, those days are over.

The US Ambassador to Iraq and our chief negotiator for the Iraqi Constitution, Zelmay Khalizad, has not been able to explain this sufficiently to the Sunnis. If he had, they would eagerly sign up for a federated Iraq, giving them autonomy rather than taking orders from a central government they will never control.

But what good is autonomy, the Sunnis might then ask, even if we have plenty of our own oil with the 11 billion-barrel East Baghdad field and over 100 billion barrels more in the Western Desert – we’re still landlocked, we’re still at the mercy of the Shias who control our only access to the sea!

It is at this point that the third switch may be flipped inside smarter Sunni minds, as they notice the Persian Gulf isn’t the only sea around. There’s another one in the direction of the setting sun. What lies between them and the Mediterranean? Syria. With all three switches on, the wheels turn:

“Syria is broke, we have oil and thus can have money coming out of ears; we are Sunni Arab, Syria is Sunni Arab; Syria’s leader is a weakling and the government is corrupt�. Hmmmm, could Syria be for sale?”

A merger of Syria and Sunni Arab Iraq – that’s what’s in the cards should Iraq be partitioned. Syria was artificially carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the French just as Iraq was by the Brits. Although Damascus is millennia older than Baghdad, both emerged into history with the advent of Islam.

Damascus was the capital of the first “Umayyad” Caliphate during Islam’s initial century. After 750, newly-built Baghdad became the capital of the “Abbasid” Caliphate. Money pouring out of Baghdad into pockets in Damascus will smooth the way to a solution as to which city is the capital and other power-sharing arrangements.

Such a merger would of course quickly put an end to the terrorist insurgency in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, as it would end Syria’s providing a sanctuary and support for it.

The very thought of such a merger gives our diplomats heart palpitations. But then, a bureaucrat who can think out of the box is an oxymoron.

Yet such thinking is going to become very necessary very soon. The map of the Middle East’s future – future as within the next decade or less – may not look like the one I’ve sketched here.

Rest assured, however, that it is going to look radically different. The map of the Middle East you see above is about to become as obsolete as one of the Soviet Union.